Tuesday, January 28, 2014

London commemorates the Holocaust

By New Worker

correspondent

VETERANS,
schoolchildren, civic dignitaries, senior police officers and 32 mayors of
London Boroughs on packed the main debating chamber at London’s City Hall on
Monday to commemorate the Holocaust.And this year the theme was “journeys”. The
ceremony was opened by the chair of the London Assembly, Darren Johnson.

This was followed by a testimonial from
Stephen Frank, born in Amsterdam in the 1930s, of his experiences as a Jewish
schoolboy during the Second World War.

He survived but this involved a lot of nightmare
journeys from one prison camp to another, a lot of pure luck and the courage
and quick thinking of his mother. But his father, who was in the Dutch
resistance, was sent to Auschwitz and died in the gas-chambers.

In 1945 Stephen was in the Theresienstadt
concentration camp in Czechoslovakia when it was liberated by the Red Army.

This was followed by music from
violinist Sophie Solomon and London Mayor Boris Johnson, who read a passage
from the book, If not now, when by Primo Levi.

Teenagers who, with their schools, had
visited Auschwitz spoke of their journey to the museum there and the
impressions the visit had made on them.

Another group of schoolchildren then
read out the statement of commitment to remember the Holocaust and do
everything possible to make sure it never happens again.

Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner then related
the effects of the Holocaust on the village in Latvia where her family had come
from.

Sophie Masereka gave a testimonial of
her experiences in Rwanda in the 1990s when hundreds of thousands of Tutsis
were massacred by Hutus in government-inspired pogroms. Sophie also survived
mainly by sheer luck, escaping impending death not once but several times. But
she sustained serious injuries and lost all her family.

Steven Frank and Sophie Masereka
together lit the memorial candle and there was more music from Sophie Solomon
and the ceremony closed with Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner reciting the Jewish
prayer for the dead, in English and in Hebrew.